On “Trystorming,” and why “best” is not “better” for the long term.

Small, steady, incremental. At face value, these adjectives may not appear best to stimulate, motivate and excite a workforce. But in the tradition of Lean manufacturing principles, these are the keys to creating a Kaizen culture. Kaizen is a Japanese term used to describe the process of gradual and orderly continuous improvement. At Solectron, it has become part of the very fabric of our company.

To be clear, creating a Kaizen culture isn’t for the faint of heart. However, to effectively deploy Lean Six Sigma techniques across an organization and unleash the power of just-in-time manufacturing, that’s exactly what it takes: a cultural transformation.

How does a company create the vision for a Kaizen culture and ensure long-term cohesiveness? In the 1990s, Solectron* won two Malcolm Baldridge Awards for quality. About four years ago, Solectron began its Lean journey to take its quality processes to a new performance level. From the start, Solectron senior management envisioned that there is never a “best” way of doing things. Instead, Solectron associates were empowered to always look for a “better” way.

Companies must incorporate three fundamental practices to begin the process of creating a Kaizen culture:

• Management and shop-floor synergy. The initiative must emanate from the CEO, who demonstrates the passion, willingness and stomach to make a cultural shift through his or her commitment to invest in people and processes. From the ground up, all employees need to embrace the vision and be dedicated to making continuous, incremental improvements.
  
  
• Process and results. By creating a holistic process to a problem, employees are able to visually identify, analyze and assess whether a Kaizen event provided a better solution. If the intended objective was not met, employees must return to the original process, revisit opportunities and provide alternative solutions.
  
  
• Trystorming. Solectron married brainstorming with action to see if an idea would work. We call this “trystorming,” and it gives everyone an opportunity to visually see the problem and try solutions. An early trystorming activity led to implementation of U-cell manufacturing lines for system configuration operations. This approach provides many benefits, not the least of which is greater flexibility to quickly configure lines based on production demand. Also, less floor space is needed to produce the same number of units.

Kaizen in Action

While one cannot measure the impact of culture in mathematical models, tools can be used that measure the progress of how adoption of processes affects Lean Six Sigma deployment throughout the organization.

First, it is important for leadership to create a consistent approach to track and monitor Lean adoption, ensuring proper review of the initiatives at site, regional and global levels. For example, Solectron uses a Lean Maturity Tracker, which evaluates 17 elements of Lean deployment progress in the area of Lean leadership, Lean fundamentals, end-to-end pull and zero defects (Jidoka). All are underscored by production level-loading, or Heijunka, as the foundation. This type of tracker ensures organized practices around all Lean initiatives.

As part of the Lean fundamentals and ensuring continuous improvement, we also established Kaizen workshops. These events normally begin about five to six weeks before any Kaizen event begins, which requires the project scope be outlined thoroughly and a cross-functional team formed to match project requirements.

Next, the team creates a value stream map, which looks at the entire manufacturing line and tags each process within the line with either a green (value-add process), red (non value-add) or yellow (value-enabler, such as a regulatory requirement) dot. The red dots are seen as opportunities for improvement in a Kaizen event.

Finally, the team goes to the shop floor directly to processes that are flagged red, so they can evaluate the situation based on facts. We call this the 3G (Genba, Genbutsu, Genjitsu) approach, which guides decision-making by always looking at the:

• Genba (place or workspace).
• Genbutsu (real thing or actual product).
• Genjitsu (real data, specific problem).

The team uses a methodology to generate as many possibilities for addressing the improvement opportunity. Each idea is assessed based on the agreed criteria. The idea that has the highest score is then put into action through trystorming.

By putting the problem on the table in the exact spot where it is occurring (3G), everyone sees the situation firsthand. We find employees are then more apt to rally around the Kaizen event, better grasp the improvement opportunity and commit to fixing it to mutual satisfaction. This process becomes so systematic that improvements are made much more efficiently.

Take, for example, a leading telecom OEM. The company used a highly manual demand management process and had an average product delivery lead time that was falling well short of customer requirements. The company needed a more stable and predictable operations environment to remain competitive. But how to achieve that seemed daunting and unattainable.

With the company, we conducted a value stream mapping analysis of the supply chain processes, which illustrated redundancies that identified what needed to be changed. This approach enabled the organization to carefully look at its manufacturing processes, from the physical layout to its internal team structure and how that team collaborated with suppliers. As a result, the company could better determine areas of waste (time, resources, materials, etc.) in the process and where improvement opportunities existed.

Using Kaizen events, the firm determined it would first implement changes with its demand management processes. The key was to first simplify, then automate, the process.

Three years and dozens of Kaizen events later, the company realized dramatic improvements:

• Product lead times reduced by 78%.
• Purchasing notification time cut by nearly 85%.
• Days required to respond to end-customers reduced by 67%.

In some cases, the improvement measures are one line within a facility; in other cases, the team will visit the customer site and drive changes at both the manufacturing plant and customer locations, as with the telecom customer.

An effective Lean process cannot exist without a culture committed to the process of improvement: a Kaizen culture. If leaders don’t create an environment where employees are empowered and rewarded for thinking of better ways to do things, results will stagnate and Lean deployment will fail.

*Ed.: Flextronics' acquisition of Solectron was finalized last month.

Marty Neese is executive vice president, Operations and Siew Mui (S.M.) Kong is senior vice president, functional excellence at Flextronics (flextronics.com).